


You Love Me Now, I'll Calculator

by ryry_peaches



Series: RoseBuddWrites February Prompt Fills [3]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Ficlet, M/M, Trouble In Paradise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22676794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryry_peaches/pseuds/ryry_peaches
Summary: For #RoseBuddWrites over on Tumblr, February Prompt 11: things left unsaid.Things fester between them.  They don't talk about it.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: RoseBuddWrites February Prompt Fills [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1625941
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	You Love Me Now, I'll Calculator

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Goes Without Saying" by Brendan Maclean. I can not recommend his music enough. Thematically, this one borrows pretty heavily from Rainbow Rowell's "Landline," aka one of my favorite novels from one of my favorite authors.
> 
> Honestly, this is pretty light as the angst genre goes, but pretty heavy in terms of my writing, so.
> 
> This is clearly not canon compliant in that Patrick and David communicate wonderfully and would never let this kind of thing happen, but it's not NOT canon compliant in that it's technically a future fic.

There are things that they don't talk about.

Patrick wanted kids, once upon a time. And then he wanted David more — more than kids, more than a picket fence, more than coaching little league and telling bedtime stories. He didn't resent David even slightly — at least, not visibly. David wasn't sure sometimes.

  


Jocelyn put on a production of The Little Mermaid at the high school, and enlisted Patrick and Stevie to help. Stevie claimed that she was too busy because, like David, she was terrified of teenagers. Patrick agreed easily, readily. Every Wednesday through Friday afternoon, he left work two hours early to go help direct and build sets. David brought him coffee after he closed alone, stood in the back of the kids' rehearsal space and watched Patrick guide fourteen-year-old Prince Eric through "Kiss the Girl."

He was absolutely in his element, and these late afternoons, when David brought his loving husband coffees and picked up pizzas for twenty kids he didn't know, were the times when David felt most like a monster.

  


When they'd first started going out, Patrick had assumed that David's jokes about drugs were mostly that — jokes. Exaggerations at worst. Relics of his former life, the person he was before the town brought him back to his family, gave him a life that didn't make him want to escape his own head.

David would smoke weed with Stevie and come home spacey and sweet, grope at Patrick until he obligingly tumbled into bed with him, petting and praising and coming tangled together. David would fall asleep after and wake up content and warm the next morning.

Maybe occasionally David would come home spacey and grope at Patrick and not be as sweet, not smell skunky-spicey, not tell him that Stevie said hi. Those nights — few and far between as they were — Patrick would heat up some dinner for David and tuck him safely into bed, refusing his advances. He'd fall asleep staring at the ceiling and letting David cuddle into him and trying not to roll away.

It was fine if it wasn't a habit, wasn't a pattern. If Patrick, in the days following his wisdom tooth removal, kept careful inventory of his painkillers, David didn't need to know that. If he found a pharma grab bag in David's nightstand drawer and flushed it while David was at work, David never said anything, so it was fine.

There was no problem.

  


Once, when they were at brunch with Moira, she trapped them into listening to a tale about a lost lover, a man she'd discarded long before she met Johnny. Someone with whom she'd been destructive and unhappy, someone she'd rolled away from at night. "Not that you boys have anything to worry about," she said. "Look at you, the picture of marital bliss — why, you remind me of myself when your father and I were first wed, David. But I know that you've been through your share of heartbreak, just like me, son, and you know as well as I do that people lie to themselves and mistake it for love."

David forced a smile and didn't look at Patrick.

Patrick stared at his half-eaten fish plate, and he wouldn't let himself think the words, but he wondered.

  


They handled one another, was the thing. Through drug-hazed babbling and poorly timed bodily functions. They kept their humor through months when the store barely kept its lights on, kept the sex fucking revelatory two, three years into their relationship. They held hands under the table at family dinners. David learned the names of Patrick's cousins' kids; they all called him "Uncle David" when David followed Patrick home for Christmas. Patrick brought David breakfast in bed on Sundays; David brought Patrick lunch while he watched baseball games.

Their marriage was effortlessly perfect — that's what Alexis told David over dinner one night, when Stevie and Johnny had wrangled Patrick into helping them run some numbers at the motel. "Me and Ted, we constantly disagree," she said as she carefully pulled the crust off her BLT. David watched her make a fussy little stack of the crusts on the side of her plate. "And it's so worth it, we've gotten very good at compromise. But you and Patrick never even have to. It's like you never even have to talk about things. You just read each other's minds."

  


One night, Patrick texted at 12 am. "Helped the kids strip the set. They asked me and Jocelyn to go to Dennys with them. See you in a couple hours XO." The Little Mermaid had come and gone; Patrick had just finished helping stage Grease. The kids called him "Mr Patrick." David had gone to opening night, but that was it.

"okay" David shot back. He fell asleep in the middle of the bed, and didn't wake up when Patrick came home.

Several weeks later, David came home with unfocused eyes and crowded him against the wall. "I'll give you a baby," he slurred, eyes half-closed and nothing on his breath. This was something new. "To keep you, I'll have a baby…"

"Okay," Patrick said quietly, and gently pried David off of him. When David slumped on the couch that night, Patrick laid a blanket over him and left him a glass of water, but he didn't help him change his clothes or make him dinner or prod him into bed.

  


"Couples' therapy," David told Stevie, voice shaking. "He wants us to go to couples' therapy."

"If your relationship is good, then you have nothing to lose by examining it," she told him, reasonable as always.

He paused for long enough that she softened. "David…what is it?"

He shook his head. Pulled two gummy bears out of his pocket in their little individual cellophane wrappers. "Wanna take a break?"

  


They didn't go to couples' therapy.

They kept being sweet to each other. In the summer, there would be no high school plays for Patrick to sink his attention into, and David would fill up on sunshine and kick the hard shit for good. He promised himself that he would make it till then. It was already April — the spring play would be in the very end of May. (It was Patrick's second spring play. Fourth play overall. Two years of this.)

The sex continued to be mind-blowing, if, at this point, predictable. The store continued to be fulfilling. They continued to hold hands and make one another meals and live their gorgeous little domestic life, everything David had ever wanted and the one thing that Patrick continued to want more than anything, enough to let his other wants go.

At some point their dreams of happily-ever-after crumbled into compromise and bitterness. And love, so much love. David wondered privately how they could coexist. How they could seem to thrive even with the things that grew around them like choking weeds.

Patrick wondered if the things that festered and rotted around their relationship were more like tumors or cysts. Could they live through it? Was their relationship too infected? Did they want to know?

  


David made that decision for them. Marched stoically onward like nothing was wrong. Acted like they were okay so that they could be okay.

They were okay. Never less, but rarely more. The things that had once grown around them like weeds and cancers began to settle like dust. Familiar not-quite arguments. Nights when they slept without touching. They never kissed in the morning before brushing their teeth anymore, but they kissed at night right after.

Maybe things would never be wonderful again, but they worked hard. Between them, they made everything okay.

**Author's Note:**

> I do not write angst. This is a total departure for me, unless you count my single CMBYN fic, which...was a total departure for me, lmao. Also it's not like...that angsty, I couldn't even bring myself to break them up. My idea of angst is just literally "a couple has a kind of dysfunctional marriage but are still more or less happy."
> 
> Anyway! Visit me on Tumblr at fourgetregret for my personal and at loveburnsbrighter for my Schitt blog. Love y'all!


End file.
